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Sarah Burke outrage builds in Sochi over banned memorial stickers

Russian President Vladimir Putin waits in the presidential lounge to be introduced at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics on Friday. Behind him, a TV screen shows four of the Olympic rings opening at the start of the ceremony, while the fifth ring remains closed. (David Goldman / The Associated Press)

Social media has exploded in anger over an IOC decision to ban athletes at Sochi from wearing memorial stickers to late Canadian skier Sarah Burke. (Nathan Bilow / The Associated Press)

Canadians reacted with anger over the weekend after the International Olympic Committee banned athletes at the Sochi Games from wearing helmet stickers honouring late freestyle skier Sarah Burke.

Emotions ran especially high in Burke’s hometown of Midland, Ont. though her father, Gord Burke, offered a calming sentiment.

“I’m looking at the big picture,” Gord Burke told the Midland Mirror. “To me it isn’t that big a deal. I know there are thousands and thousands of people who always cared about Sarah, and so that is what is important to remember.”

Burke was a four-time X Games halfpipe champion who was a pioneer in the sport and lobbied to have it included in the Olympics, and would have been a favourite to win gold in Sochi. Since her death in January 2012 at age 29, her memory has been treasured by athletes and fans alike.

The IOC made its ruling earlier this month, basing it on the Olympic Charter, which bans “publicity or propaganda, commercial or otherwise,” from athletic clothing and protective gear.

Social media exploded over the weekend with condemnation for the ruling, but Gord Burke said he will proceed with his plans to travel to Sochi and honour his daughter by cheering for the halfpipe competitors.

PUTIN MISSED OPENING GLITCH: A glitch in the opening ceremonies at the Sochi Olympics was quickly hidden from most observers in Russia, including President Vladimir Putin.

Putin paused and turned his head away momentarily from a monitor showing the ceremonies, and the glitch that prevented the fifth Olympic ring from lighting up. He reportedly turned back to the monitor, but by that time, technical crews had spliced in a version of the Olympic ring lighting in which all five rings were illuminated perfectly.

Photos taken by Associated Press photographer David Goldman show Putin turning away just as the glitch takes place. The television crew quickly went to work, providing Putin and Russian viewers with images of the rings taken from opening ceremony rehearsals.

The ring-lighting failure seemed to justify concerns of many, that Sochi had not fully finished preparations to stage the Games.

FEDERER LOVING THE GAMES:Roger Federer got a warm response on Twitter Sunday after he made a pair of posts praising Olympians in Sochi, including Canada’s medal-winning sisters Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe.

He also sent out a picture of the Dufour-Lapointe sisters holding hands after their medals Saturday, adding the comment “So cute, sport is great.”

That post got just under 3,000 retweets within three hours.

SEATING CONCERNS: Russian officials claim empty seats at several events are due to a preference by the country’s public, sponsors and members of the sporting federation to skip preliminary events.

But events like slopestyle snowboarding and long track speed skating have seen hundreds of empty seats even for medal rounds and Olympic-record performances.

Even Evgeni Plushenko, a four-time Olympian and a national hero in Russia, faced empty seats when he competed in the figure skating team competition at the Iceberg Skating Palace over the weekend.

Sochi organizers claimed last week that roughly 80 per cent of tickets for the Games were sold by Feb. 1. Figures for the total number of tickets, though, were not given; organizers even said some of the events were sold out despite clear views of empty seats.

Plushenko noticed the empty seats but was still thrilled by the cheers and celebrations offered by those in attendance.

“It was incredible,” Plushenko said. “Sometimes it helps when people clap but today I felt kind of dizzy, (the noise came) from there, from there, from there, from everywhere.

“But it’s my fourth Olympic Games, so it was fun. It’s something new for me.”

MAKING BRITISH HISTORY: Jenny Jones’s bronze medal for Britain in slopestyle snowboarding was golden — and then some — for her country.

Jones went down in British Olympic history, her medal in the stylish, hip snowboard event becoming the first ever medal on snow for Britain in 90 years of Winter Olympics.

“Absolutely ecstatic,” said Jones, who became the 23rd British athlete to win a Winter Games medal, though the previous 22 all came on ice surfaces rather than snow.

“All that waiting. I was only the second person to drop and there were so many more girls to come. When the last girl went and I realized she had messed the rail a bit, it was just like ‘Oh my goodness. I am on the podium.’”

Jones won her bronze by a margin of 0.25 points over the fourth-place rider, but her achievement was still monumental. She won at age 33, after having never ridden a snowboard until she tried one on a dry ski slope in her native Bristol at age 16.

Alain Baxter won bronze in slalom skiing for Great Britain in 2002, but had to hand the medal back after testing positive for a banned substance (later linked to his use of an inhaler). The closest Team GB came to a medal prior to that was Gina Hathorn’s fourth-place finish in slalom at the 1968 Games in Grenoble.

CANADIAN CONTENT: Ski jumping turned in some crowd-pleasing performances on Sunday, including a gold medal in the normal hill event for Poland’s Kamil Stoch. Canada’s McKenzie Boyd-Clowes finished 36th while 18-year-old Dusty Korek, competing in his first Games, finished 39th … In the men’s 30-kilometre cross-country skiathlon, Alex Harvey of St-Ferreol-les-Neiges, Que., was the top Canadian, finishing 18th with a time of one hour, 10 minutes, 0.2 seconds, while teammate Ivan Babikov of Canmore, Alta., was 25th in 1:10:14.6. Harvey entered Sochi after a strong World Cup season that included two victories. Babikov, born in Russia, was fifth in the event at the Vancouver Olympics. “In the classical portion, it was over after the second leg,” Harvey said. “We had zero grip, and we were not very fast either. We lost 45 seconds in that portion, and we were pushing at 100 per cent, when the other guys in front were only pushing at 75 to 80 per cent.”

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